A small company approached Rockport Chemicals because they needed to automate their canning process. They were experiencing too much room for error, leaving too many rejected containers. They wanted a solution where the operator could pick the item they were canning from a menu and the controller would do the rest. They also requested a bigger screen so Rockport went with the Horner Micro X10 controller.

The Horner X10 was set up to monitor 2 temperature sensors, one inside the canning kettle and the other one in the jars. The operator chooses which product they are canning from the menu and setpoints are loaded from memory. They can edit setpoints if needed but each time they pick a new recipe they are set to default again. If the temperature gets too low a steam valve is opened raising it. When the canning batch has completed a beeper goes on, alerting the operator.

“The X10 worked perfectly because it had a nice big screen and built-in I/O, eliminating having to add remote I/O thus saving on cost.”

~ Daniel Wipf, Rockport Chemicals, Alexandria, South Dakota